Cooking With Coffee: The Best Recipes
Sure, there’s coffee in your kitchen—but do you cook with it?
If not, or if you limit your cooking with coffee experiments to desert, you are missing out. Coffee adds two things to savory applications: depth of flavor and richness. As such, it is a natural in sauces and marinades. It promotes caramelization when combined with sugar in a dry rub. In short, cooking with coffee brings all things brown and delicious to the pan!
Here are five of our favorite savory coffee recipes to get you started!
Coffee Bacon Sandwiches
Joy the Baker has managed to combine two of the best things on the planet, coffee and bacon, in one sandwich. In this recipe from her cookbook, she marinates the bacon in a mixture of ground coffee, brown sugar, molasses and chili powder. Note that she specifically mentions that the coffee adds “depth and richness”—exactly what we promised you in the introduction!
Coffee Rubbed Filet Mignon with Ancho Mushroom Sauce
Chef Bobby Flay is not shy about grilling down with a cup of joe, or in this case, ¼ cup of finely ground espresso. This coffee rubbed filet mignon is a featured recipe on Flay’s website. He also uses this same rub on a rib-eye over at Food Network. The ingredients would lend themselves to almost any dry rub application, and trying it on some pork or lamb is at the top of our cooking to-do list.
Short Ribs with Coffee and Chilies
New York Times food blogger Mark Bittman (“The Minimalist”) prepares these ribs using an old world technique of using leftover coffee as a braising liquid. Bittman ups the ante by adding red wine and chilies to the braising mix. One word of caution—braising is a “low and slow” cooking technique, and these ribs are better if you cook for the recommended 3+ hours. It’s worth the wait…
Risotto with Capers and Espresso
Food and Wine magazine has an entire slide show filled with recipes for cooking with coffee—21 of them, to be exact. Our favorite? Massimiliano Alajmo’s espresso infused risotto. The stock is infused with whole beans, and the dish is finished with ground beans. Buon Appetito!
Baby Back Ribs with Coffee-Bourbon Barbecue Sauce
Let’s see—coffee and bacon, coffee and chilies, coffee and wine…what have we left out? Coffee and bourbon! Emeril Lagasse’s coffee-bourbon barbecue sauce is our hands-down, five-star favorite. As Emeril would say—“Pow!”
Have a favorite recipe for cooking with coffee? Share it with us in the comments below!
Main photo: bruna camargo
Content photo: Andrew _ B
